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	Catlin's portrait of the Lakota woman Tchonsumonska (The Sand Bar), who was admired for her beauty. Catlin noted that she "was very richly dressed, the upper part of her garment being almost literally covered in brass buttons." Sand Bar was the wife of Francis A. Chardon, a well-known American Fur Company trader. She died only a few years after Catlin met her, succumbing to smallpox during the epidemics that devastated Upper Missouri communities in 1837. Engraving from Catlin's Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, 1841.	Woman's Side Fold Dress Central Plains/Upper Missouri River (Sioux or Cheyenne?) Large mammal hide (elk?), horse hair, porcupine quills, bird quills, unidentified plant fiber, glass beads, brass buttons, cowry shells (Cyprea montea), tin-plated tinklers, red wool, pigments, glue sizing, woven wool tape L:119 cm W:78 cm PM# 99-12-10/53047 This elaborate two-piece, side-fold dress (see previous object, catalogue no. 53046) is decorated in part with dyed porcupine quills and cowrie shells, materials having a long history of use in native North America (although these cowry, an Indo-Pacific species, must have been imported for trade). The brass buttons, red wool, glass beads, cone tinklers, and pigment were trade goods that came into vogue during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The English gilt brass buttons on the yoke, like the metal trade tokens issued by fur trading companies, were popular decorative elements and status markers during the early nineteenth century. Lewis and Clark noted that brass buttons were more highly sought than all other items save beads. George Catlin painted several Lakota women, one the wife of a trader, displaying rows of such brass disks on their dresses. This is a special occasion dress, worn especially for dancing. The yoke of this dress has been impressed into a geometric pattern and then painted with clear sizing or hoof glue, a decorative treatment of hide practiced by several central Plains groups including the Cheyenne and the Hidatsa. The rows of horizontal quill work punctuated by red wool "tufts," as well as the arrangement of the brass buttons, suggest that this dress may have been made by a Cheyenne, Dakota or Lakota woman. This may be the dress given to the Peale Museum by the Hutter family in 1828 and described in the Peale ledger as a "Soux squaws dress." Clark also acquired a dress on the expedition that he described as "an Indian dress, such as the Soues women ware [sic] in their dances." He presented that dress to first lady Dolley Madison.

	<previous -index- next> h o m e i n t r o o b j e c t s m a p r e s o u r c e s c r e d i t s The Ethnography of Lewis and Clark: Native American Objects and the American Quest for Commerce and Science Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Copyright ©President and Fellows of Harvard College